Landing and taking off again out of line of sight

[wollins]

Can you land and take off again with one of these drones? (specifically Mini 3Pro) Say for instance, for whatever reason you're like two kilometers away and you deliberately landed ... can you take off again? I guess that would depend on if you still had RC connection, right? (probably slim to none since you're now on the ground?)

 

[Yorkshire_Pud]

Theoretically yes, in practise probably not.
As you say, the signal could be interrupted during the descent and if that happens 'too early' the drone will initiate the Lost Connection setting. If the signal was lost too late and it lands then you will not be able to restart the motors.
Other considerations, stuff on the ground may prevent the motors from turning, a grass stalk has stopped a motor of one of my drones from starting. The tilt of the drone may be too great etc. etc..

In short, it's a risky thing to try unless you are prepared to go to the landing site to recover the drone.

Additional problems, if you do manage it, the home point will be set to the take off point so you need to know how to reset the homepoint. I would guess others can think of more problems.

 

[MAvic_South_Oz]

Provided you keep VERY good signal LOS between the drone and controller, then yes it's feasible . . . not without risk.
Besides any vegetation (low trees / bushes, grass), slight landforms etc interfering the signal LOS, this could also be affected with antenna angle etc, I would say.

Even the curvature of the Earth at 2km is 0.31m (1').
The weaker signal at that distance combined with that might be enough to lose signal on or near landing.

Flying from a high point would make it a lot easier to do.

Most past threads on this have been relevant to overriding the hard wired 500m (1640') max alt above take off point, to enable flying further up a mountainside, while still maintaining the 400' AGL rule.
Finding that ledge or rock you can land on with signal LOS and keeping that signal is also risky.

 

[RadioFlyerMan]

Can you land and take off again with one of these drones? (specifically Mini 3Pro) Say for instance, for whatever reason you're like two kilometers away and you deliberately landed ... can you take off again? I guess that would depend on if you still had RC connection, right? (probably slim to none since you're now on the ground?)

The problem with your scenario is distance… signal, VLOS. But yes you can land and take off at shorter distances while maintaining VLOS. I’ve done it on my 15 acre property. I landed about 100 ft away in a open area (concrete surface, no trees or other obstacles.) Certainly I did it as an experiment, but I found it didn’t serve any cinematic purpose for the videos I produce.
My advice is don’t do it in any public area.

 

[DARKSeifer]

Yes, but to have signal at 2Km on a landed drone... that's quite hard to achieve.

There's one reason you may want to perform a maneuver like that, and it's when you realize that you don't have enough battery to get back home; so instead of trying to flight all the way back and lose the drone by throttling or auto landing in a bad spot, you decide to invest the battery you have in to search a good provisional landing spot, like the flat top of a building, stop the motors, drive near that location, start the motors again and fly the drone to you with the battery that's left.

Don't push the batteries, come back before yellow, don't fly away long distances with a tailwind, and you'll never have to do things like that. Swapping batteries is easier than searching the pieces of a crashed drone.

 

[MAvic_South_Oz]

There's one reason you may want to perform a maneuver like that, and it's when you realize that you don't have enough battery to get back home; so instead of trying to flight all the way back and lose the drone by throttling or auto landing in a bad spot, you decide to invest the battery you have in to search a good provisional landing spot, like the flat top of a building,

Always a good plan to know what the surrounding terrain is like for this purpose, local parks or ovals, or flat plains etc nearby.

Of course if you lose signal when descending in such a case, and as your failsafe is likely set to RTH, then the drone will attempt the RTH option, which will leave you in a dilemma once again.

Not many will generally have the failsafe option set to land or hover.

May be better to descend and watch signal, if it gets too weak just let it hover and either :

Make the dash for that location if possible and land.

Or, let it hover with a decent landing spot below, while still with good signal, keep cancelling RTH, until it enters failsafe landing. Then watch landing spot with camera pointing down and adjust as best you can to the ground conditions as long as you have the video feed.

Better to plan flights correctly and have decent reserve battery though.

 

[Heavydpj]

Can you land and take off again with one of these drones? (specifically Mini 3Pro) Say for instance, for whatever reason you're like two kilometers away and you deliberately landed ... can you take off again? I guess that would depend on if you still had RC connection, right? (probably slim to none since you're now on the ground?)

I routinely practice remote landings and take offs. Not because I'm some out of control wild-man, but because I know that there may be a situation where I'll be legally flying, but may need to emergency land at a place I can't see (e.g. low battery, bird attack, manned aircraft).

I have a nice open field with a piece of plywood that I've spray painted a circle and cross on. The site is LOS, but I practice landing completely on camera